How much does a Fractional AI Director cost?

Retainers start at £3,500 per month, covering two to four hours of strategic advisory work, and go up to £8,500 per month for a full fractional engagement where I'm in your organisation 16 to 20 hours a month. Standalone project work is £1,750 per day with a two-day minimum, fixed scope and fixed fee. Every retainer is monthly rolling with a 30-day exit clause. There is no lock-in.

What ROI can I expect from AI implementation?

That depends on your starting point, which is why every engagement begins with an audit rather than a promise. The Midlands council engagement delivered £780,000 in combined savings and recovered funding. Ninety days into a manufacturing SME engagement, operating costs were down 43%. The regional law firm freed 40% of senior fee-earner time and found £2.1M in new revenue through documents they already had. In each case the bottleneck was not the AI: it was data quality and governance problems that had been sitting there for years.

Do you work with local councils and government organisations?

Yes, and public sector work is a significant part of the portfolio. The Midlands council case study is the most detailed example: £300,000 saved, £480,000 in additional funding identified, zero GDPR incidents. Council engagements are built to be procurement-compliant from day one. That means data protection impact assessments, PSED alignment, and FOI considerations are dealt with as part of delivery, not bolted on at sign-off.

What makes AI-Si.com different from Big 4 consultancies?

The main difference is what happens after the strategy is written. Big 4 engagements typically conclude at that point, with junior consultants handling delivery. I stay through implementation personally, building working prototypes in your meetings rather than after them, managing the vendor relationship, and reporting outcomes to the board directly. Big 4 rates for that level of involvement start at £2,000 per day per consultant. My full fractional engagement starts at £8,500 per month.

How do you ensure AI implementations are secure and compliant?

Every engagement starts with a data quality and governance audit before any AI tool is selected or deployed. That is not a compliance formality: it is where most implementations fail. Prompt injection testing and data minimisation are built into delivery from week one, not treated as a sign-off exercise. Simon Steggles has held data protection responsibility at board level. ISO 42001 alignment and vendor contract review for data training rights are included in every governance engagement.

Can you help identify new funding opportunities through AI?

Yes. The Midlands council case study is the clearest example: £480,000 in additional grant funding the council was entitled to but had not been claiming, identified through AI-assisted analysis of the funding landscape. A West Midlands charity secured £220,000 in additional funding through the same approach. It works because AI can map a funding landscape in hours that would take a human analyst weeks, but only when the underlying data is in good enough shape to work with.

Do you provide staff AI training?

Yes. The training is built around your actual workflows, not a generic AI literacy curriculum. Executives get a different session to operational teams, and I run a structured AI champion programme for the people who'll carry this forward inside the organisation. We cover prompt engineering, what your staff can and can't share with AI tools under UK GDPR, and how to identify and report problems. Staff are already using AI whether a policy exists or not. The training means that use is documented and under control.

Proof of ConceptProcurement

I Submitted a £96,000 Government Tender Without Reading It

1 March 2026Last reviewed 6 July 20265 min readBy Simon Steggles· Fractional AI Director Birmingham, UK

Who this is for:SME owners, sole operators, and business leaders who have considered government tendering but assumed it was beyond their capacity.

TL;DR

This was a deliberate proof of concept. A custom AI pipeline found the opportunity, wrote the bid, and submitted it. I did not review a single page. Here is what the results showed.

£96K

Value of the government tender, UK financial regulatory authority

70%

Overall score, zero human review

20/20

Cost score: perfect, beat the university

Key takeaways

The proof of concept confirmed AI can manage the full tender lifecycle with zero human intervention after setup.
A submission produced and filed entirely by AI, with no human review, scored 70% in a live government evaluation.
On methodology, the AI-written response was indistinguishable from the university that won. On cost, it beat the university outright.
The only meaningful gap was track record: a structural difference, not a failure of the approach.
The barrier to public sector revenue for most SMEs is process, not capability. This proof of concept made that case with data.

This is not a claim about what AI can do in theory. This is a documented proof of concept with a real tender, a real government body, and a real score.

In 2026, I designed and ran a proof of concept to answer one specific question: can AI handle a government tender from discovery to submission, end to end, without a human touching the document? I submitted a £96,000 government procurement response on behalf of AI Director Ltd. The evaluating body was a UK financial regulatory authority. I did not read the submission before it went in. I built the system. I did not produce the document.

How the Pipeline Worked

I built a custom tool called TenderWatch. It monitors global government procurement portals automatically, scanning for opportunities that match predefined criteria.

TenderWatch flagged this opportunity and passed it to a second AI pipeline. That pipeline downloaded the full tender pack, read the specification, mapped the evaluation criteria against their exact weighting, and generated a compliant response using real company data: AI Director Ltd's actual capability, methodology, and pricing.

Then it submitted.

No human review. No editing pass. No final read-through. The submission went in exactly as the AI produced it.

"The question I was testing: can AI handle the full lifecycle of a government tender, end to end, with zero human intervention after setup? The answer is yes."

The Result

AI Director Ltd achieved an overall score of 70%. The winning submission came from a leading UK university, scoring 85%.

That headline figure does not tell the full story. The breakdown does.

How AI Director Ltd Scored Against the University

Category	Weighting	AI Director Ltd	University (Winner)	Result
Methodology	40 points	30 / 40	30 / 40	Tied
Cost	20 points	20 / 20	< 20 / 20	Won
Experience	40 points	Lower	Higher	Lost

Why I Built This

I have ADD. Public procurement is one of the most cognitively demanding administrative processes that exists. Dense documents, strict compliance requirements, precise formatting rules, and multi-section scoring criteria create a barrier that has cost me opportunities for years.

My response was not to push through the barrier. It was to remove myself from the process entirely.

The core insight: the gap was not capability. The methodology was identical to the university's. The pricing was better. The gap was track record: one person's history versus an academic institution with decades of documented delivery. That is not a problem AI solves. But it is a small gap that closes with each engagement won.

What This Means for Your Organisation

Most businesses avoid public sector tenders for the same reason I did: the process, not the capability. The document volume alone is enough to deter a director with a full workload. Add compliance mapping, evaluation criteria interpretation, and pricing models, and it becomes a full-time job.

It does not have to be.

A well-designed AI procurement pipeline changes the economics entirely. A sole operator, with no bid-writing team, scored within 15 points of a university on methodology and outperformed it on cost. That is what happens when the workflow is fixed.

AI is not a tool for technologists. It is a tool for strategic thinkers who see the opportunity and need the process removed from their path. That is exactly what a Fractional AI Director builds.

Proof of Concept Findings

If your organisation is avoiding public procurement because it feels unmanageable, that assessment is correct for the current workflow. The answer is not to hire a bid writer. The answer is to redesign the system.

The proof of concept confirmed AI can manage the full tender lifecycle with zero human intervention after setup.
A submission produced and filed entirely by AI, with no human review, scored 70% in a live government evaluation.
On methodology, the AI-written response was indistinguishable from the university that won.
The only meaningful gap was track record: a structural difference, not a failure of the approach.
The barrier to public sector revenue for most SMEs is process, not capability. This proof of concept made that case with data.

Work With AI-Si.com

If public sector revenue is within reach but the process is blocking you, a Fractional AI Director can change that. Let's talk about what your pipeline could look like.

Book a Strategy Call or see our services.

Frequently asked questions

Can AI really write a compliant government tender from scratch?+

Yes, with the right pipeline design. The key is mapping the evaluation criteria accurately before generation, using real organisational data rather than generic content, and structuring the response to match the scoring methodology the evaluator will apply. TenderWatch was built specifically to handle this sequence. The result, a compliant 70% submission with no human review, confirms it is achievable.

What types of organisations does this approach suit?+

Any organisation with demonstrable capability but limited capacity for procurement administration. This includes SMEs, specialist consultancies, sole operators, and growth-stage businesses that are qualified for public contracts but locked out by the process overhead. It also suits leadership teams that want to scale their tender pipeline without scaling headcount.

What is a Fractional AI Director and how is it different from an AI consultant?+

A Fractional AI Director operates at board level: setting strategy, owning governance, and delivering measurable outcomes. An AI consultant typically advises and moves on. A Fractional AI Director embeds into the organisation, builds systems that continue working after they leave, and is accountable to commercial results.

How do I find out if AI procurement automation is right for my business?+

The starting point is an honest assessment of your current procurement activity: how many opportunities you are qualified for but not pursuing, and why. If the answer is process burden rather than capability gap, automation is the right fix. Book a no-obligation call with Simon Steggles at AI-Si.com to discuss your specific situation.

About the author

Simon Steggles - Fractional AI Director

Simon helps UK SMEs and councils put AI to work safely. Royal Navy 1984–90 (Cat 3 PV at the time, now superseded by DV); current NPPV3 Police vetting for public-sector work; ISACA AI Governance certified. Based in Birmingham. £300K+ recovered for councils, 43% cost reduction in manufacturing, zero data-protection incidents across every engagement.

More about Simon

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